Data Governance - Why It Matters to the Business from Informatica IThound

Data Governance - Why It Matters to the Business
by Informatica
Published:April 2006
Format: Portable Document Format (.pdf)
Length: 17 pages
Overview

Although its value is not represented on the balance sheet, data is one of the most important assets in an organization. Data represents an organization's customers, employees, and suppliers; its activities and transactions; and its outcomes and results.

Managed correctly, data can become an organization's most valuable asset, helping it to remain competitive and agile, to proactively meet customer needs, and to keep costs in check.
Companies and government organizations of all sizes are striving to manage data as an enterprise asset, to be shared and reused across multiple software applications and systems, business processes, and users throughout the organization. They're finding that they need to establish standards, policies, and processes for the usage, development, and management of data. They recognize that creating the right organizational structure and developing the technology infrastructure to support the governance of their data is critical, too.

As a practice with roots in corporate and information technology (IT) governance, data governance is defined as the processes, policies, standards, organization, and technologies required to manage and ensure the availability, accessibility, quality, consistency, auditability, and security of data in an organization.

The goals of data governance are to:
• Ensure data meets the needs of the business
• Protect, manage and develop data as a valued enterprise asset
• Lower the costs of managing data

While achieving these goals is attractive in theory, putting data governance into actual practice requires a compelling business driver.

This white paper explores the most common business drivers of data governance initiatives, which are:

• Growing revenue by increasing cross-sell/up-sell rates and improving retention among existing customers with a broad and deep understanding of their existing customers.

• Lowering costs by increasing operational efficiency with business process automation and eliminating redundancies.

• Ensuring compliance with a variety of external regulations and internal corporate governance policies by streamlining the collection of reporting data and increasing its auditability.

Beyond these business drivers, this white paper discusses two macro business trends that are further escalating the need for data governance: an increase in merger and acquisition (M&A) activity, and a rise in partnering and outsourcing non-core business functions.
After reading this white paper, you will understand the building blocks of an effective data governance framework. You will also know about several key success factors for ensuring that your organization's data is accessible, available, of high quality, consistent, auditable, and secure across the enterprise.

Go to White Paper

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